Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a retired principal and co-founder (with Dr. Donald A. Norman) of the Nielsen Norman Group. Jakob established the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and invented the heuristic evaluation method.
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
Instead of maximizing the profits from an individual visit it is better to encourage loyal users and establish non-monetary differentiation and frequent-user programs.
Web usability has focused on ease of learning for the new visitor. While learnability remains important, it is time to also consider expert performance.
Instead of making users wander indefinitely and frustratingly around a site looking for something that's just not there, tell them if it lacks a frequently requested feature
Web users go straight for content and ignore navigation areas. Limited structural navigation and local navigation still help, but general navigation should be avoided and generic links minimized to the truly useful.
Focus groups and surveys study users'
opinions - not actual behavior - so they are misleading
for the design of interactive systems like websites.
Automated usability measures are just as misleading.
Increased user impatience will make
new websites fail unless they are twice as usable as existing sites.
Revolutionary Internet services must explain why users should care
in no more than two lines.
